By Terry O’Brien
Fifty years ago, a pair of windscreen wiper blades cost me about $4. I have often wondered whether replacing them helped save two lives.
I was travelling from Bourke to Parkes, a journey of more than 400 kilometres, to attend a seminar. On the way down, I became increasingly unhappy with the wipers on my vehicle. Fine spray thrown up by heavy vehicles was not clearing properly from the windscreen.
So in Parkes I arranged to have both blades replaced overnight.
The next day was wet. Ever cautious, before setting out for the long drive back to Bourke I did a circuit of the streets of Parkes, simply to make sure the new blades were working properly.
About 20 minutes north of town, we came across a small sedan that had apparently spun off the road only minutes earlier. It had turned through 90 degrees and crashed into a large tree on the opposite side of the road. Steam was still pouring from it.
My two passengers sat frozen in their seats while I used the two-way radio in our vehicle to contact our works office at Nyngan, about 200 kilometres away, and ask for police, ambulance and rescue services to be sent.
This was long before mobile phones. Out there, the radio was our only lifeline. I hurried across to the car. A bloodied face looked back at me from the passenger seat.
“Terry, thank God you are here.”
The passenger was Ray, a former workmate from Newcastle. He and his wife, Anne, had been driving back from a holiday at Jindabyne, heading towards Newcastle via Dubbo. They had already been on the road for hours.
Ray was trapped by his ankle. Anne had suffered serious injuries and was pinned by the steering wheel.
I turned off the ignition because I was worried about fire, then stayed with Anne, trying to keep her conscious by talking about people and places we both knew from Newcastle while we waited for help to arrive.
Eventually rescue crews freed them. Anne had to be removed through the back of the vehicle using the jaws of life, and both were taken away by ambulance. Afterwards, while standing beside the wreck, I spoke with the police sergeant from Peak Hill who was supervising the recovery.
Something about him seemed familiar. Then we realised we had met years before, hundreds of kilometres away near Newcastle, when he had used my unmarked Department of Main Roads vehicle to gather radar speed readings on the Pacific Highway south of Swansea.
Before I continued to Bourke, he invited us to his home at Peak Hill for a cup of tea. His wife opened the door.
“Hi Terry,” she said. “I saw you at the little mission church at Bourke last Sunday.”
She had been visiting her brother, a policeman stationed there. I’d been there because Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Daughters of Charity sisters had dragooned me into encouraging some of the parish’s Indigenous ladies to deliver the Scripture readings at Mass.
By then, the coincidences were beginning to pile up.
Ray and Anne had travelled for hours from Jindabyne. I had driven from Bourke to Parkes, replaced two windscreen wipers, and for no particularly important reason had taken an extra circuit of the town before leaving.
We met on an isolated stretch of road at almost exactly the moment help was needed. The policeman who attended was someone I had known years earlier in Newcastle. His wife had seen me at Mass in Bourke only days before.
Years later, Ray contacted me again. Anne had survived her injuries and gone on to give birth to a baby boy. They named him Damian — the same name as my second-youngest son.
Sadly, Anne died some years later.
Many people would look back at that day and call the whole thing coincidence. I cannot.
I still think about that $4 pair of windscreen wipers, the unnecessary circuit of Parkes, and the handful of people whose paths converged on a lonely stretch of the Newell Highway.
For me, it remains a reminder that Christ can be present in the most unexpected places — even miles from anywhere, beside a wrecked car on a country road.
Terry O’Brien is a long-time contributor to The Catholic Weekly’s letters page. His reader’s reflection was prompted by The Catholic Weekly editorial of 26 July 2026. Share your story at catholicweekly.com.au/share-your-story/
